"I'd much sooner stay here and be wafted over by an act of faith."
"I'll give you three seconds and then I shall take the luncheon-basket," Raney answered, pulling a gold turnip-watch out of his trouser pocket. It was the first but not the last time that I saw it. On the back was a monogram which could with some difficulty be read as 'L. K.'—a memorial of Kossuth. I fancy it was the one piece of personal property that O'Rane carried from the old world to the new.
VII
Our party for Commem. had all the elements of failure. I have been back to Oxford three or four times since 1903, and they ordered this matter better than in my day. The go-as-you-please spirit of London society spread quickly, and from the account of my young cousins, the Hunter-Oakleigh boys, I gather that of late years a man would invite one girl to place herself under the shadowy protection of an unknown chaperon and spend three agreeable days and nights dancing, supping, lunching and basking on the river in his sole company.
We were less enterprising and more dutiful. Any sisters who had come out were invited, and where sisters ran short we fell back on cousins or family friends so well known as to retain no suggestion of romance. There were five men—Loring, Dainton, Summertown, O'Rane and myself, balanced by Lady Loring, Lady Amy, a Miss Cressfield, Sally Farwell and my cousin Violet. It was understood that Loring would want to dance chiefly with my cousin, and that Dainton and Miss Cressfield would form an incomparable alliance of stolidity and silence; Summertown, who had injured his knee playing polo, volunteered to keep Lady Loring amused; his sister, Lady Sally, was allotted to O'Rane; and I was to take charge of Amy Loring.
The arrangement looked well enough on paper, but I foresaw serious defects in the working. For one thing, O'Rane and his victim had never met; for another, I had seen nothing of Amy Loring since my first Commem. On that occasion—though, Heaven forgive me! I was but nineteen or twenty—I had fallen deeply in love with her, and was preparing the way for a declaration when she deliberately dropped some remark to remind me of the difference in our religions. After that we rather carefully avoided each other—till by degrees we felt we could safely become friends again. I suppose it is now fifteen years since she cut me short and spared me some part of the disappointment; neither of us has married. The secret was our own, and Loring was innocent of irony when he said, "You and Amy know each other by now, you'll get on all right."
The most serious menace to our party came on the morning of the first ball. Tom Dainton rushed up from his digs. in Oriel Street to tell us Miss Cressfield had taken to her bed with an internal chill and would be unable to join us.
"Awful bore!" he growled in his deep voice. "Spoils the numbers. I'd better cry off."
"Can't you get someone in her place?" I asked.